Inspiration
With inspiration from the Norwegian electric vehicle success, we wanted to build a solution that would simplify the everyday life of an electric vehicle owner and the HECO administration.
What it does
The starting point of the app was to give the government and Hawaiian Electric companies insight to the various charging stations around Hawaii. The app should inform them about where the charging stations are located, where there is most activity, which charging stations have problems / need to be replaced, congestion, health and CO2 emission saved. These are essential factors to improve the situation and facilitate electric motorists in Hawaii.
How we built it
We sorted all the data we had accessed into an Excel sheet. Here we started looking for possible errors that could be essential for our customer to know. Based on this, we were able to construct different charts to give an indication of the situation at the different charging stations.
Challenges we ran into
During our work on the project, we have experienced a few challenges. At first, our team consisted of members who were new to coding and application development. Our ambitions and concept for the application was far beyond our knowledge of coding. We were extremely lucky to find our last team member right before it was too late, who has great experience within coding. So, we finally became a team that was able to cover all the fields within the projects. Group work require good communication to develop a good result. We have had many meetings and communicated well during the whole process, but we also have had some misunderstandings. We have managed to correct the misconceptions, and are now left with an end result all team members are proud of. Another challenge was that we should have had access to more data about the usage of electric vehicles, to further improve our application and accommodate our ambitions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to have started from scratch, really without the fundamental knowledge to develop such an app, but how a good collaboration with teammates who complement each other and contributes in different ways, have now managed to develop a product we are proud of, and something that we can present to an audience.
What we learned
First of all we learned that it is essential to assemble a group of people with different skills to achieve the most efficient work as possible. As mentioned earlier, we have learned that it is significant for the team members to communicate well. In addition, we have also received new learning from the workshops, for instance about giving a presentation, pitching and requirements.
What's next for Hawaiian Vikings
Next step is to further improve our app, so that we are fully satisfied with our product. When we are totally finished with the app, we hope that it can be a useful tool to improve the public system for electric vehicles in Hawaii. Our goal is to help improve the system, so that it will be well-facilitated for electric vehicles and the number of users will increase, which will improve the environmental situation. Moving forward, we also want to develop the app to be both for the HECO administration and for the user of the electric vehicles as its equally important to provide customers with similar information - where the charging station is located, if they're functional, whether they are occupied or available and an estimated time for when they will be available. The app should therefore be developed for both parties - the government and Hawaiian Electric companies and the consumers.
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